Every human settlement worth its salt needs good storytellers and in the wondrous city of Porto I was lucky to meet a master of the craft.
On a wet November morning dozens of us gathered for a free English-language tour organised by Porto Walkers, a group of locals passionate about their city. I joined about 20 people from four continents and our guide was a Porto native called Viriato Morais.
Leading a walking tour of a major European city in the rain might daunt some, but Viriato delivered a virtuoso performance. He is a wiry, energetic man, born one day after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 which brought to a close nearly half a century of authoritarian rule.
Our guide had one big thing helping him – the grandeur, the vitality of the historic Atlantic city that is Porto. After a period of stagnation in the 20th century, it has now found its mojo again.
“Hello everyone, welcome to Porto, welcome to Porto Walkers. My name is Vi… And who am I? Well, I am a local guy. I was born and raised in the city of Porto, although I lived a little bit around the world. I lived in Spain, in France, in Belgium, in England, in Germany, in Wales, in Ireland, in Scotland, in Mexico, in Angola, in Brazil, well a little bit around the world. The main reason for that, it’s because I am a professional actor.”
Viriato, it transpired, had spent several months living in Pembrokeshire and professed a love of Wales and the Welsh. More of that later, because the matter at hand right now is Porto.
The first highlight of the tour was São Bento station, an unusual terminus in that tourists snapping pictures of its hand-painted tiles often seem to outnumber the train passengers. The tiles, about 20,000 of them, were the work of artist Jorge Colaço. The monumental task of painting and putting up the blue tiles, depicting scenes from Portuguese history, lasted from 1905 to 1916.
Viriato said of Colaço: “He was a Portuguese man, although he was born in Tangier, and he found a rule that came from the Moors that used to say that perfection belongs to God, so that way the artist or the creator cannot make a perfect job, otherwise he will be defying or insulting God.” Viriato said the artist deliberately changed the position of five tiles, visible in the lower part of a battle scene, to avoid offending God.
Subjects tackled by Viriato ranged from art, architecture and history to the more edgy topic of consumer advice, offered as we stood on Porto’s most important shopping thoroughfare, Rua Santa Catarina, 1.5 km long. Our guide focused on one historic cafe on the street, with very fancy prices, and offered his take on marketing practice there.
“You’re going to go inside and they will say ‘Welcome this is J.K. Rowling’s table, welcome this is J.K. Rowling’s table, welcome this is J.K. Rowling’s table. Well, all the tables are going to be J.K. Rowling tables. And all of that because J.K. lived in Portugal between ‘91 and ‘94. But if you want to know a little bit more about her join the afternoon tour where that story will be developed in detail.”
By tackling a range of people and places with gusto and knowledge, Viriato held everyone’s attention – no mean feat for a tour of nearly three hours under grey skies and drizzle.
We finished by walking down steep stone staircases to the quayside by the river Douro, where Porto’s priciest restaurants can be found. Viriato offered more consumer advice, useful for newcomers to Portugal. With total accuracy, he warned that many restaurants put bread, olives and other tidbits on the table when diners arrive. The unwary might think these are free, but they are not and can add considerably to the bill. Viriato said “Send it all back if you don’t want it.”
One message which came through strongly from our guide was that Porto’s success in attracting tourists makes it a very crowded place in summer. Viriato said that in the past summer (2018) there were nine tourists for every inhabitant in Porto, about twice the comparable figures for Barcelona (4:1) and London (5:1).
We met again after the tour and dug deeper into a few subjects. I said my understanding was that 20, 30 years ago Porto had gone through a bad patch. “In the 20th century, I would say, not only in the last 20 years…Porto, Portugal in general, with the wars, with our dictatorship, Porto was very much abandoned.”
Viriato then recounted a very personal story, bringing together his country’s own political renewal and his arrival in the world. “I was born on the 26th of April 1974, so the very first day of democracy in this country. So my Mum went to hospital on the 24th. I spent the 25th trying to come out and on the 26th I was out. A struggle for freedom, just like my country.”
When, I asked, did Porto hit bottom? “I would say the 80s. In the 80s Porto was a ghost town. In the 80s and 90s Porto was indeed a ghost town. Nothing was happening. I remember it was not safe at all to walk in the streets. Most of the neighbourhoods were not friendly…There was a big problem with drugs, drug addiction in Portugal, in the 80s and 90s.”
He said the shift from dictatorship to democracy and the big exodus of Portuguese people from Africa when the colonies finally won their independence all contributed then to social tensions.
When we discussed the recovery of the city, Viriato pinpointed 2001, when Porto was a European Capital of Culture, as a turning point and over the next few years transformation. “That was when you felt a massive change from the old city to the new city… Porto looked like a construction yard. We built the metro, we changed all the squares in the city.”
Today Porto is heaving with tourists, many of them from Asia, and to illustrate the speed and scale of change Viriato told a story of something that happened in 1999. He invited a Japanese friend to stay with him in Porto and one day the Japanese friend got lost and did not appear for dinner. This was before mobile phones.
Viriato said: “I went to the main square and basically I screamed ‘anybody saw a Japanese?’ And funnily enough a guy came out of a bar and said ‘yes, I saw one’ and he pointed in this direction. So I went across the road and I screamed again and another guy came, ‘I saw one.’… He was the only Asian Japanese guy in town.” So the friend who was lost was found. “Can you imagine me asking that now in the city? That would be ridiculous today and we’re talking about 19 years.”
I asked Viriato if there were any downsides to the tourism boom for the people of Porto. “There are loads of downsides, loads of downsides, but at the end of the day I still consider it positive,” he said. One challenge now, with the crowded streets, was arriving on time for appointments. “Six years ago I could tell you “I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” because those were the 20 minutes taken for the last 20 years… In the last six years we don’t know. It can take 20 minutes, it can take half an hour, 45 minutes, one hour because a lot of traffic, people in the streets, groups of tourists made it totally impossible to calculate that sort of time.”
Another problem for locals has been steeply rising rents. “It is very difficult for the young generation to live in the city centre,” he said, adding that a small studio apartment in the centre cost at least 600 euros a month while the minimum wage was 570 euros.
The city’s population has haemorrhaged significantly in recent decades because of the poor living conditions in the late 20th century. Viriato said it had dropped from about 400,000 at the start of the 1980s to 216,000 today. “Now people are trying to return to the city,” he said.
He pinpointed the preservation of identity as the biggest struggle now faced by the people of Porto, which he said had historically been a “bubbling town” and a great trading centre with an independent spirit.
“What I felt in the last five years when we started getting the revenues, the tourists started arriving, the big fight now for the people of Porto is really to keep their identity and to teach that to the people who will come and are coming to stay in Porto, because we have loads of foreigners coming to live in Porto nowadays. In the last five years the amount of people that came on vacation and decided at some point to actually move over, it’s gigantic. So what we need – the obligation of the locals – is to pass that out to the people who are coming to stay in Porto. That passion that we have for the city, the spirit of the people of the city, yes our roughness, our foul mouth, our heart in the throat as we like to say, our not being afraid, but at the same time being family. So we are still very much a family here in town.”
During the walking tour, Viriato had said to me: “Wales is really my country. I am a Welshman inside.” So when we met for our one-on-one conversation I asked him to say more. In his twenties he had spent at least six months in Wales, invited by a friend to the Pembrokeshire village of Llawhaden near Narberth. He did a range of things there, from decorating to teaching circus skills to local children.
What did he like about Wales? “Oh, wow, everything really. I have learned a lot in Wales, funnily enough. I was really lucky to be with amazing people, the community around there, all of them were amazing people, very friendly. They taught me a lot about farming, fishing, construction, beekeeping…”
“I felt that the Welsh were very similar to the Portuguese….We have loads of things in common, I would say, the Portuguese and the Welsh. We are the quiet ones, we are the cool ones, you know…Let us enjoy the good things of life.”
Portuguese Notebook 